4 Steps To Letting Go Of Your Past

We live in a world filled with so much wonder, beauty and love. Adorable creatures to behold, wonderful experiences and memories to remember, great friends that put smiles on our faces. Now, imagine not being able to take notice of these because you’re too caught up in the past and its wrongs. Imagine not being able to smile when you remember those beautiful memories because your mind is too busy battling with past memories that hurt.

In this world, there is good and bad, beauty and deformity, hurt and comfort, negative and positive, but if you must enjoy life, you must not pay attention to the negative, rather, you could try to make things positive. You must not dwell on hurtful pasts caused by others’ wrongs or your own wrongs. You must learn to let go of your past in order to enjoy the present and embrace the future.

Here are basic steps to letting go of your past

1. Understand why you need to let go of the past:

Living in the past deprives you of the present so much that you can’t see or touch the future. Just as its name is, it takes you backward, deep in and you can’t move forward because your drive to move is lost in its depth. As a result, you can’t achieve your dreams, you lose everything in a world where there are lots of things.

Again, your heart is at stake. You’re hurting while probably the one who hurt you is feeling no hurt. Why keep hurting and feeling depressed when you can also decide to put the past where it belongs.

Happiness is a choice, a decision, one you should take.

2. Decision

Great decisions are the bedrock of great actions. After you must have understood why you should let go of your past, you must do something very important which is to make a decision to let go of the past. This is immediately followed by deliberate actions to let it go.

3. Address it

Instead of ruminating on what has happened and how that you are right or how that you are a victim of the other party’s wrong, channel that energy to trying to make things right. It could mean directly expressing your hurt to the other party and talking things over.

It could also mean doing a soul-searching to know what went wrong; are you being selfish, not considering if the party is also hurt by an attitude you put up? Did you jump into conclusions? When all these are done and checked, you could then understand what the hurt is really all about and take action to right the wrongs.

4. Forgive and move on

First, you must forgive yourself before you forgive others. The mistake has been done, it can’t be undone but there’s something you can do to make things right — forgiveness.

Forgiveness gives more to the giver than to the receiver.

— Carmel Phillips

You gain a lot when you forgive – peace, loss of anxiety, health, it goes on and on. If you must be freed from the bondage of the past, you must forgive and move on. Blaming anyone doesn’t help in anyway, just swallow the pain and forgive. This is definitely not easy but maybe seeing how miserable you’re becoming will help you forgive without looking back.

Life is too short to bear hurts and pain for too long, it’s too short to dwell on old stuff, when new stuff constantly come our way. You need not allow your past, shift or blur your vision, weigh you down and cause you other challenges.